The coding blog of Alastair Smith, a software developer based in Cambridge, UK. Interested in DevOps, Azure, Kubernetes, .NET Core, and VueJS.
I’ve recently been reconfiguring my home network to utilise a Windows domain. As I’ve improved my home development environment, I’ve started needing to make greater use of network shares and things, and running a mixed-OS environment as I do, I have inevitably run into some problems with credentials. This is the first post in a two-part series; this post will describe my initial experiences configuring my domain, whilst the second post will focus on getting Ubuntu and Fedora Core 7 talking to my domain. After solving some rather annoying hardware issues and (thankfully, in hindsight) dropping my previous plan to deploy Xen as my hypervisor1, I started installing Windows Server 2008. I chose this most recent version of Windows Server for a couple of reasons:<ol><li>I’ve used it at work and quite like it</li>
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Running a four-core AMD rig with 4GB RAM as I am, I opted for the x64 version. Installation was painless (Microsoft have done wonders with their Operating System installers for both Vista and Server 2008) and very soon I had a basic installation running. A few tweaks later and BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM! I had AD DS, AD CS, IIS 7, File Services and DNS installed and configured. The server roles really are an effective way of simplifying the configuration of some complex network infrastructure, like Active Directory. In Windows 2000 Server, Active Directory was a scary, monolithic beast; in Windows Server 2008, it’s smooth, streamlined and well tamed.
Later on, I realised that I’d missed a role: DHCP. This is something with which I’ve never had any experience configuring, but the role installation wizard walked me through the minefield with a clear map of the way forward. Very quickly, I had Server 2008 dishing out IP addresses to the rest of my network left, right and centre, and confirmed this by turning off the DHCP on my router. Copying over the address reservations from the router to Server 2008 also proved very easy, with the only small hiccough being that the MAC address box in Server 2008 doesn’t accept any byte delimiters (so colons are right out).
The next step was to install VMware Server for running virtual machines. I quickly found that VMware Server 1.0.x is not supported on Vista and Server 2008, so my only option was to download the beta of Server 2.0. This is very different from the 1.0.x versions that I’m used to, with management now handled through a web interface rather than a console program. Accessing the web interface proved to be a bit of a bitch for no good reason, but after playing around with the Windows firewall and ensuring that all the VMware services were running, it started to play ball2.
The next step was to move my existing Fedora Core 7 VM (which hosts this blog, and most of my development tools, such as my Subversion repositories, Trac environments and Cruise Control log files) to the new VMware server. This was accomplished really very painlessly, as would be expected, despite the fact that I was moving the VM from a 1.0.x to a 2.0b host. I simply copied over the VM’s files (~15 mins for over 40GB thanks to my Gigabit Ethernet subnet), imported the VM into the VMware Server inventory and hit “power on”. I love server virtualisation3 :-)
Finally, I got around to creating a set of new VMs. These are running Vista and Ubuntu (both x86 due to the small amount of memory I can allocate them), and Windows Server is still responsive. I guess that’s because I’ve still got 1 core and ~2GB RAM to throw at running it. It definitely took a hit when I was running two further VMs (Vista and Ubuntu x64), and VMware Server kept suspending one or more of the VMs due to lack of resources. This was mildly disappointing given the grunt I’ve thrown at the machine, but not hugely surprising given that the Vista VMs were consuming 2-3GB RAM between them.
The next post will focus on setting up my Ubuntu and Fedora VMs to work with the Active Directory Domain.
1 Thankfully, as I realised soon after starting to install Windows Server 2008 that if I hadn't done this, all my data would have been tied up in a VHD file. Not good. Back to article.
2 You'd be right to wonder what on Earth I'm doing running a VMware server on an Active Directory Primary Domain Controller. Indeed, VMware warn against this in their installer. However, this mostly applies to environments where the Domain Controller is going to be under load and need it to remain responsive. With the VMs shut down, the Domain Controller runs effectively idle with very little in the way of CPU load, and relatively standard RAM load. Back to article.
3 And even working for the second biggest player in the server virtualisation field, exposed to the technology on a daily basis, I'm still impressed by it! Back to article.